


Uncharted Water

by Serpensortia_parapluie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/F, M/M, Orochimaru is mentioned, Sapphic September, Uzumaki Karin - Freeform, are you seriously telling me Karin is not marked as an Uzumaki in the main tags, harry potter magic square, mild description of a non-major character's death by burning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 04:03:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16110401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serpensortia_parapluie/pseuds/Serpensortia_parapluie
Summary: Haruno Sakura has a plan for her life after Hogwarts. So does Uzumaki Karin.This is where their plans meet.Written for the Uzushiogakure no Sato'sSapphic SeptemberEvent, "Harry Potter magic" square.





	Uncharted Water

**Author's Note:**

> Starting with the disclaimers: I do not own, nor am I associated with the creators of _Naruto_ and _Harry Potter_ , and I do not give permission for my works to be posted on sites like _Goodreads_.  
>  Second order of business: I wrote this for the [Uzushiogakure no Sato's](https://uzushi0.tumblr.com) _Sapphic September_ Event. To the best of my knowledge, it is open for anyone, and it's basically a bingo slot for any Naruto F/F pairing, the rarer the better. I chose Haruno Sakura/Uzumaki Karin, and the Harry Potter magic square.  
>  I literally found out about this yesterday and pounded this out. Sorry if I don't have the right format for the event's rules. Let me know and I can fix that later.  
> The title comes from _Only a Girl_ by Gia. I'm not associated with her either.

So, Karin’s not a huge fan of this whole ‘being a witch’ thing. She’s had enough of it in her life already, thanks. Her home village burned her mom for being a witch, even though she was a squib and only had enough magic to make potions that the villagers happily took in return for allowing her to live on the outskirts of the village. Karin was nine, and had already been exhibiting accidental magic for a year before, thankfully hidden from the villagers.

They didn’t even do it properly; her mom didn’t die from the burning so much as from the burns.

Karin spent two long, sleepless nights watching as her mom struggled to breathe, rasping each breath and trying not to choke herself on the ash hanging heavy in the air, thick and reeking of pork. On the morning of the second day after they burnt her mother, the villagers came to take her from her ramshackle house’s blackened ruins to make some potions for them.

She couldn't, of course. She didn’t have any of the ingredients or the recipes, and she didn’t know how to infuse just a trickle of magic instead of the stream her being fully magical would use. She couldn’t figure out the right amount of magic to add to ensure that the potion wasn’t inert or too magical for a non-magic person to safely consume.

She was exhausted and kept breaking out into tears because her mother was dying and she hadn’t slept since the house caught fire.

They didn’t believe her, and they wouldn’t let her stop trying until the sun had long set and her hands were burned and aching from handling the hot cauldrons, and covered in small cuts from frantically trying to prepare ingredients with a village elder breathing down her neck.

By the time she made it back to the ruins of the only home she’d ever known, her mother wasn’t breathing anymore.

-

Sakura excels at spell theory, and her essays are the best-written in her year, but frankly, her actual casting sucks. It’s not her fault- everyone has a well of magic within them to draw from for their spells, and hers just isn’t very big. It’s possible to expand this internal well of magic with diligent practice and various and sundry others things help, but those are things she can’t do anything about, like coming from a magical background.

Which she doesn’t.

Sakura’s a muggleborn, which means her internal spring depended on luck of the draw, and not on spending her gestating period and childhood in a magically rich environment like purebloods do.

Sasuke, the ice-prince of Slytherin, is a pureblood who has spent all of his life thus far at his family’s ancestral lands and has been practicing his magic since he could hold a wand, even after his brother went Dark. He has no problem casting, and he’s cute, but Sakura has to admit, to herself at least, that she’s a bit bitter about it.

Naruto, who doesn’t even have parents and is so dumb Sakura’s amazed daily he managed to get into Slytherin in the first place, doesn’t have any issues casting. If anything, his problem is that he puts too much power into things! Sakura’d love to have that problem.

Even Hinata, a girl in her year, and Ino, Sakura’s best friend and a fellow Ravenclaw, find casting easy! Hinata, a Hufflepuff pureblood girl she sits next to in Astronomy and Transfiguration, has enough magic to cast properly, she just lacks confidence. Ino is vivacious and cheery and lacks in technique. But then, both of them are the Heiresses to Noble and Ancient Houses, so it makes sense that they both have a large well of magic to draw from. 

Sometimes, it just isn’t fair. Sakura, now that she isn’t the odd one out and has a friend in Ino, is becoming much more self-assured and at ease with herself, and she understands the theory in a way that blows Ino out of the water! But she’s stuck with sub-par casting just because her parents aren’t magical.

It makes her want to punch something, but how do you punch genetics?

-

Karin bides her time. She’s managed to piece together some of the potions her mother used to brew so effortlessly with faint scraps of memory and trial and error, usually on herself, because if she made a mistake and made any of the villagers sicker, she’d be in for a beating.

They allow her to go to school, thankfully. She puts all of her focus into the science classes, and if the villagers think that it’s because she wants to get better at potion-making, so be it.

She’s going to get out of here one day, and she’s going to become the _best_ damn doctor and heal people she wants to heal, using science, which _makes sense_.

(And if any of these bastards come to her to get treated, she’s going to poison them, just wait and see!)

-

For all the years at Hogwarts up til now felt like they were dragging on endlessly, Sakura feels like the days are speeding by faster than the snitch vanishes at a Quidditch match now that her NEWTS are approaching.

Graduation is coming up soon, and for all that she has her life planned out after Hogwarts- an apprenticeship to the renowned Medic Witch Tsunade, who revolutionized the industry, completing her own studies and becoming a Medic Witch herself, and then opening her own practice and starting her own medical revolution- she doesn’t know what she’s going to do next.

She thinks back about the things she’s going to miss, and the things she’s not.

She’s going to miss sharing Herbology class with Ino, gossiping with small bouquets of mundane flowers while never saying a word.

She’s going to miss Naruto, and his endless optimism and plans to become head of the Wizenmagot. She’s going to miss Sasuke, and his studiousness and determination to back Naruto in changing their society for their better, now that he’s returned from his ‘sabbatical’ that everyone knows is really code for ‘whoops I accidentally almost ended up as the patsy for a rising Dark Lord, but I defeated him so it’s all better now and not at all suspicious’.

Well, okay, maybe not everyone knows that. She feels like the Aurors would have something to say about Sasuke’s Dark tendencies and past actions if they did.

She’s not going to miss Naruto and Sasuke’s dramatic off and on relationship though. (Though that’s probably because somehow these idiots feel like her brothers now, and while she thinks she might be getting free of it, she knows better. The only way they’re shaking her off or she’s losing them is if one of them dies.)

She’s looking forward to the end of History of Magic, because while book-work is an area she excels in, they basically spent seven years on the same section of history and she only really learned anything because she did supplemental reading.

She’s going to miss these halls, and their ghosts and happy memories.

More practically, she’s going to miss not having to worry about rent, a steady supply of food available at any hour that she doesn’t have to cook, and free potion ingredients for experimentation.

Oh well, she thinks to herself sternly. Now’s not the time to worry about that.

And with her back straight and proud, she steps into the exam hall.

-

She scrimped and saved and sometimes, outright stole- but she has enough muggle money to get her to London and Diagon Alley, and then some to barter with the goblins her mother told her about. She never begged; she’s too proud for that.

She finished primary school, as tough as that was to accomplish when the villagers didn’t want her out of their sight or working on anything but their magical cures, and she got good enough grades to go to university, if she wanted.

She does, and she doesn’t. She’s going to be a doctor, but money is a concern.

Karin takes her first step out of the village keeping her prisoner at the age of eighteen, nine years after they killed her mother, and feels the runic notice-me-not ward set by her mother and powered by her blood and magic, fall.

It’s three in the morning, a time Karin’s heard called the witching hour, and she’s taking advantage of it. She’s leaving now, and never coming back. Fuck them. She’d poison the whole village’s water supply if she thought she could get away with it.

She’s going to Diagon Alley, a place she’s never been, and her first stop is going to be Gringotts, to see if her ‘Ancient and Noble’ name has any money left for her, and then she’s going places.

She’s going to become a doctor, come hell or high water. Magic didn’t help save her mother, but maybe medicine could have.

-

Naruto’s owl wakes her up from a dead sleep, passed out over her textbook. She skims over it quickly- apparently he’s found some long lost family or something- before she glances up and sees the time. Naruto’s hand is on ‘Diagon Alley’, and no surprise, so is Sasuke’s. Kakashi, their lazy bum of an ex-DADA professor they ended up accidentally on purpose adopting, is on ‘late’, an addition to her clock Sakura still doesn’t know how he got there.

What makes her curse hard enough to turn the air blue is that her hand on the clock is on ‘late’ too. She drops the letter and rushes off in a whirlwind of activity to get ready in appropriate muggle attire. Today’s the first day of her additional muggle medical courses, and of course, she’s fucking late!

-

Karin’s sitting near one of the three doors out of the lecture hall for her Bio 101 course- shared, of course, with about fifty students who aren’t even on a science track and therefore don’t give a shit and are sure to be really annoying even though the course itself is going to be dumbed way down so they can keep up- when a girl with pink hair rushes in, interrupting the professor going over the syllabus with apologies.

Immediately, she sits up from her disinterested slouch. Well, now. This girl’s pretty cute, even if she’s late, and there’s only three empty seats left in the room.

Two of which are next to Karin, because she excels at weaponizing her resting bitch face. She makes sure to smile nicely when the girl looks around for a seat. This class is going to be so easy, she’d appreciate a little bit of eye candy, even if the girl turns out to be dumb as a box of rocks or an english major or something.

-

Two weeks in, and Sakura’s about ready to start sleeping during class, for all that she never succumbed all throughout Hogwarts during History of Magic. The professor is literally reading straight from the textbook, and even emails them the slideshow, which is basically what the textbook says, except phrased a little more accessibly. ‘Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell’ is word for word what she remembers from muggle school before Hogwarts though, and from the supplementary classes she took to keep up with her non-magical peers.

The most interesting part of the course- besides how the professor is grading on a heavy curve so he can avoid outright failing as many students as possible for bragging rights in his department for ‘least number of students dropped out of a 101 course’- is the girl she sits next to, with the brightest red hair and tightest pencil skirt she’s ever seen.

She’s not even pretending to pay attention, which Sakura admires. She gets 100% on every test and her name is Karin Uzumaki and she’s Naruto new-found cousin. The former she knows because Sakura hands over her paper after every test is given back, and the latter because Naruto is absolutely over the moon to have found any living family. She’s kind of curious how they found each other, but she’s too distracted to wonder very much.

Sakura’s in love.

For real, this time! Or at least, she thinks so. It’s not like how she used to feel about Sasuke, before she got to know him better and realized he’s a total mess and head over heels for Naruto and mostly in denial about it. That was all fluttery and soft, like levitating a feather felt for the first time, and made her blush all the time.

It’s not like her and Ino, either. That was Ino and Sakura getting drunk and realizing they weren’t in competition over Sasuke anymore and becoming friends again after having some really sloppy inexperienced sex. They’re not really into each other enough for a long term relationship they agreed after waking up in bed together naked.

Though they are fuck buddies when they’re not in a relationship with someone else now.

No, this time is different. She’s not all fluttery and twitterpated over Karin. She’s not writing her and Karin’s name in hearts on the margins of her papers. She’s not focused on Karin’s appearance over her actual personality and intelligence- not that she doesn’t think that Karin’s pretty, because she is.

Her hair is somewhere between ruby and garnet and Sakura almost wants the name of her stylist, except she has the suspicion that it’s natural because Karin’s eyebrows aren’t brown or anything like that, her roots never show, and most damning of all, her eyelashes are red too, on the days she forgoes makeup. Sakura doesn’t know how to explain Karin’s eyes, and if she didn’t know better, she’d think Karin has some magical blood, because she doesn’t know how else someone’s eyes can be red without having albinism.

Sakura could spend hours waxing lyrical about Karin’s striking coloring, her efficient and graceful movements, her unfairly clear skin, the curve of her thighs in her favorite tight skirts, and more.

(And she has. Ino has taken to asking, “How the not-girlfriend?” when she sees Sakura for their weekly chats.)

But that’s not really what draws Sakura’s attention to Karin, and gives her a helpless feeling of attraction.

No, that’s how competent Karin is with her knowledge of the material they’re covering. Admittedly, it is only intro-level stuff and clearly, both Sakura and Karin could have actually taught this course, but it is a prerequisite for any upper-level courses in their major. Karin also takes no shit, not from any condescending frat boys trying to offer to ‘tutor’ her, or any other classmate that tries to team up for group projects only to mooch off of her effort, or anyone who makes disparaging comments about their hair.

It’s how, when they get to talking, their dreams for the future are similar. Sakura doesn’t have the same things driving her as Karin does- she mentions once, having to watch her mom die and wanting to know enough to not be in that kind of position again. Sakura likes that drive, even though it comes from a place of sorrow.

She likes Karin’s sarcasm, shown in muttered comments while the professor lectures, too quiet for him to call her on it.

She likes how Karin adjusts her glasses when she makes a point.

She likes how blunt Karin is.

She just likes Karin.

...Now, hopefully, she can muster up the nerve to ask her out for coffee before the semester ends.

-

Turns out the girl’s kind of a genius. A genius with pink hair named Sakura. Even her name’s cute, dammit.

Three classes in and Karin really wants to ask this girl out, except she doesn’t know if she’s into girls or not. She wants to try hinting, but she’s not sure how well that would go over. If they were in an english class, she’d bring up poetry and Sappho would be a natural segue into ‘hey, do you like girls? Because I do’, but this is bio.

She could come up with a lot of pick-up lines, but she didn’t want to just sleep with Sakura. She wanted to- to see her cute little smile all the time, see the sparkle in those big green eyes when she’s pissed as hell, find out if her hair is as soft as it looks, share her textbooks and read all of her silly little notes she scribbled in the margins, correcting the text.

Karin wanted to _date_ her, fuck. She doesn’t know how to date. She was basically a prisoner in her village from birth until she escaped, and she sure as fuck didn’t date when she was there. She didn’t trust a single fucker there- if she let anyone there know she likes girls, who knows what they might have done to her? And no way in hell was she going to date any of the boys- she wasn’t sure if they might have found a way to trap her then, snare her in a marriage with 2.5 kids that they’d try to use as well- no. Not happening.

Just after midterms she almost bit the bullet and asked Sakura out anyway, because what the hell, she still wanted to hang out even though their studying together for midterms had ended up in them being incredibly stressed out, accidentally syncing up their periods, and screaming at each other until they were hoarse.

Then, just as she was leaning across the aisle to whisper pointed comments about their professor’s competence to Sakura because she liked the way Sakura tried to hide her smile at the corner of her mouth and failed, she glanced down.

Lying innocently in Sakura’s open bag slumped against the legs of her desk, was a length of wood. Not a pencil.

Sakura has a wand.

Sakura is a witch.

Well, that explains a lot.

-

Something changes after midterms. Karin starts looking at Sakura more often, and they hang out more often outside of class. Usually with Naruto and Sasuke tagging along with him, so it’s never really just the two of them- but oh, how she wants it to be.

Right now it mostly feels uncomfortably like double-dates, where one member of each couple has no idea it’s a date.

Especially right now, given that they went to see a movie.

Almost two hours of sitting in the dark next to Karin and hearing Naruto and Sasuke’s familiar voices murmuring on her other side, feeling her arm pressed up against Karin’s on the armrest, Karin’s habitually muttered comments, so much like Naruto’s, closer to her ear, their cheeks almost brushing each other- well. Sakura can’t remember anything of what they just watched.

-

Karin breaks on a Friday, right after class. Well, not _right_ after- she manages to hold off long enough to drag Sakura to one of the random patches of trees and grass that pepper the campus and check that no one’s close enough to overhear anything.

She ignores Sakura’s sputters about getting to her next class, “You’re gonna be skipping it!” and leans in close to whisper.

“I know you’re a witch, I am too!”

Karin also ignores Sakura’s shocked expression to lean back, hands placed confidently on her hips as she declares, “Alright, no more secrets. Now, are you gonna ask me out or not?!”

-

She did. 

**Author's Note:**

> Fun facts! Lots of ‘em:  
> 1\. I have no idea how this fic happened? I heard about this project and managed to knock this out in a day. (Hence the abundance of commas and dashes.) I don’t even ship Sakura/Karin? Or, well, I didn’t? The more I think about it, the more they have in common and the more likely it seems. They’re both terrifyingly competent med-nins who at one point in time had a crush on Sasuke and have pretty big tempers. There’s canon pairings with less connecting them.  
> 2\. Tsunade’s medical revolution was dragging it out of the dark ages. There were still treatments depending on the humors of the body and allusions to wandering reproductive organs. It wasn’t pretty. Sakura’s revolution is going to be combining muggle and magical treatments.  
> 3\. Magic totally ended up as a mildly forgotten plot point? Whoops. This fic wrote itself, I didn’t know Karin was going to be like, ‘fuck magic’ until at some point post-fic Sakura convinces her to give it a go and she ends up getting her magical GED and then Sakura’s revolution ends up being a joint one and she doesn’t even care.  
> 4\. Oh yeah, I totally managed to get Kakashi slipped in there.  
> 5\. Sasuke and Naruto are Slytherins. Sasuke still is a ball of angst who wants to murder his brother the murderer and focuses intently on that goal. He even ditched school for a bit to study under the Dark Lord Orochimaru, who was mostly a boogyman to the wizarding world than an actual war leading threat. ‘Eat your greens or Orochimaru will take you to experiment on!’ but he’d been around so long and kept himself so underground he was treated more like an urban rumor, hence why Sasuke was able to come back and finish schooling at Hogwarts. Naruto is a Slytherin because in canon he’s been declaring he wants to become Hokage since he figured out what the job is basically, and where else can that kind of unbridled ambition go than the House of the ambitious? Sakura’s a Ravenclaw because the first time we see her in canon she’s the top of their grade and doesn’t really have goals. Those come later. At eleven, she’s book-smart and doesn’t have a whole lot else going for her. I went less in-depth for everyone else, ngl. Ino’s Ravenclaw because she seems set to follow her dad into T&I, most likely the I. Hinata’s a Hufflepuff because she’s unwilling to hurt her sister because she loves her or to yell at Neji.  
> 6\. I listened to a lot of Sapphic playlists while writing this.  
> 7\. I am open to maybe one day writing more in this verse, but that mostly depends on mutual interest- mine and yours, the readers.  
> 8\. I did not really edit this well, apologies for the copious commas and gregarious sentences of imposing lengths. And probably repetitive concepts. Also, I'm American and all of my experience of University comes from America.  
> 9\. I did have a bio prof who graded us on such a heavy curve, I should have gotten an 80% on a test, but instead I got a 100%, and yes, he did tell us it was because he wanted bragging rights in his department. I imagine if you were a bio/sciences major in that class, having everything be dumbed down so much for the benefit of other majors (like me) would have been irritating, in particular because it is indeed a prerequisite.  
> 10\. "Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" was word-for-word in my elementary, junior/middle high, high school, _and_ college textbooks. I can't identify it on a diagram, nor really describe what it does, but by damn do I know it is the powerhouse of the cell.  
>  11\. I actually hate Naruto modern!aus, how did this happen to me.  
> 12\. I am on the blue hellsite, as it is known in the common parlance, which is not the phrase I wanted to use but I cannot remember how to spell 'collequilar' correctly and that's close enough for how tired I am.


End file.
